Downtown Democracy: Municipal Government’s Responsiveness to Mass Policy Preferences

Liberal. Liberal. Left-winged. Liberal. Progressive. Liberal. All of these terms were tossed around in the media’s chatter as Mayor Bill de Blasio continued his push in early August for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to host its 2016 convention in the much-heralded epicenter of liberalism: Brooklyn, New York.

Is Mayor de Blasio, through his quest for the DNC convention and his administration’s proposed policies (like universal pre-K and ID cards for undocumented immigrants), shoving ideology down the throat of New Yorkers and, perchance, the rest of the nation?

Or is it that the Mayor’s policies are a natural response to the views of a population that as a whole is comparatively more liberal than other metropolitan areas?

In the forthcoming study “Representation in Municipal Government,” to be published in the August edition of American Political Science Review, Chris Tausanovitch’s and Christopher Warshaw’s research suggests that New York’s recent ideological shift is more the latter and less the former.

Although describing cities and mayors as “engines of change” has been a catch phrase of late, little to no research has been done on the policy preferences of city residents and the responsiveness of municipal government to those preferences. Utilizing newly available estimates of mass public conservatism for over 1,600 cities, Tausanovitch and Warshaw analyze a number of public opinion surveys against municipal policy outcomes (such as the size of municipal government and the area’s tax structure) to find that 1) some cities and its policies are more conservative than others, and 2) municipal governments more or less are fairly responsive to the policy preferences of their constituents.

Tausanovitch and Warshaw also test a number of hypotheses to determine whether institutional constraints, such as term limits and direct democracy provisions (for instance, participatory budgeting), have a role to play in municipal responsiveness and mass policy preferences. The two find that, overall, institutional characteristics of the city government are not statistically significant to the extent to which that municipal policy is responsive to the preferences of its citizens.

If we were to accept the findings here, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s actions and policies are pretty much reflective and responsive to the preferences of New Yorkers at large. Further, institutional changes—like getting rid of mayoral term limits or eliminating partisan primaries—may have little to no impact on making municipal public policies more amenable to the majority of people’s wishes.

Do you find yourself in the minority and don’t like what your city government and the will of the majority are doing? You could always follow Tiebout’s guidance and vote with your feet (Mesa, Arizona and San Francisco, California just so happen to be the most conservative and liberal cities respectively), or simply vote the mayor or city council members out of power in the next round of elections. As Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “Do what you may, there is no true power among men except in the free union of their will.”

Article Source: Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government,” (August 2014) American Political Science Review.

Feature Photo: cc/(Wikimedia)